Conventional commercial restrooms are characterized by multiple plumbing fixtures and their respective fittings, such as water closets with flushometers, urinals with and without flushometers, lavatory sinks with faucets, and the accompanying devices that dispense consumables such as soap, paper towels, water closet tissues, water closet disposable seat covers, urinal deodorant supplies, and wall hung air fresheners. With such a wide diversity of amenities in any given commercial restroom, periodic maintenance of the consumables alone (consumables are those provided materials that are used by the restroom patrons as a function of traffic) creates a substantial task list, not only in the supply of them into the dispensing devices within the restroom, but also into the particular facility where they are being consumed.
Managers of commercial restrooms view the restroom as yet another expense or at the other extreme an opportunity to make a statement to their customers. Indeed many studies have shown a large impact can be experienced by customers whether positive or negative by the customer's singular visit to the restroom area. In some of these installations, the multi fixture restrooms can be many and can be located in remote parts of a large expansive campus. Typically the cleaning, consumable refilling, and plumbing maintenance has fallen under the responsibility of the property owner or property manager. The routine cleaning of the restroom and refilling of the soap, paper towels, and paper tissue dispensers has typically fallen upon the in house group under maintenance called house keepers. Their primary responsibility is to maintain the commercial restrooms for a pleasant and efficient use by customers visiting the property. This routine cleaning is accomplished by facilities through many schemes and systems that range from very informal and non specific, to regimented systems of routes and times of the routing. In the past, most owners of commercial restrooms have cleaned and maintained the restroom this way in order to maintain an area of the property (commercial restroom) but is a procedure which can do harm with an unpleasant patron experience.
Of all the venues for commercial restrooms, one common patron problem is universal. More times than not, a particular patron of the commercial property restroom is not familiar with the property layout and the location of all of the possible restrooms. Manual signage is only indicative of location; and in the instance of many people using the most convenient restroom, forewarning of a queue (people waiting in line inside the restroom) and choices of alternate restrooms with no queues is not possible. Moreover, conventional restroom facilities, especially in high traffic areas, such as airports, stadiums, educational institutions, and restaurants have traditionally experienced long queues and insufficient or wasted asset capacity during periods of peak restroom usage. As such, potential restroom users are often subjected to frustration and inconvenience as a result of these issues. A particular challenge is not only the daily servicing many of these restrooms, but it is also being able to leverage that service with fewer employees in a job position, which is also prone to high turnover. For example, if a particular restroom within a property has not been used all day, there is no need to waste valuable time servicing that restroom. This is equally valid if certain fixtures are known historically to have been used more than others; and the periodic routine maintenance of that fixture could potentially be deferred to a less frequent servicing routine, if there were some efficient way to do so.
The tasks of cleaning and replenishing consumables in a commercial restroom have ultimately fallen upon the owner of the general property. Whether that property is a public pay for entertainment (movie theatres and stadiums), hospitality (hotels and resorts), convention halls, or high traffic public locations (railroad stations, airports, etc.) varying degrees of methods have been used to clean and replenish the commercial restrooms of those properties. Much of the methods have been home grown and specific to the properties, from simple route plans that teams of employees are instructed to follow (to evenly cover the expansive property layouts), to specific routines of restrooms based upon known general traffic conditions. For example, in airports, a restroom located next to a gate which routinely deplanes large body aircraft may be overly utilized whenever the large population of flyers deplanes. Depending upon the level of quality desired for each property, the actual maintenance routine could be minimal, leaving major cleaning to less traffic periods. The actual routing of house keepers and verifying a cleaning/replenishment routine is left to knowledge of the property traffic and simple hand written logs which sometimes can be found hanging in an inconspicuous spot within the restroom. Absent a miscalculation on traffic pattern or an incomplete service routine by a new maintenance employee, the need for servicing may be determined only by a physical observation of the restroom or worse yet, a customer complaint about the state of a substandard commercial restroom.
National restaurant chains and QSRs (Quick Serve Restaurants) know the impact of substandard restroom cleanliness with some chains actually placing a dollar value on the cost. Such a costly element of the business is left to the good practices of a busy manager who with the best of intentions during the manager's work day, does not always have the time to devote to restroom quality. The forgotten small restrooms during the business day can better be monitored centrally from the home offices as well as allowing for the economies of large scale use on consumables purchases for bargaining with low cost providers of such consumables. It is yet another factor of today's business models that can have the restroom monitoring being performed remotely as well as the consumables procurement being remote from the actual consumption.
A large segment of commercial restroom owners contract out the sanitation tasks of the commercial restroom to outside service providers and the service that used to be in house is now more economically sourced out. This has allowed for reductions in house personnel to maintain the restroom, keeping a fraction of the previous work force for emergency tasks. These service providers can be a local agent or a branch of a larger state or country wide company. With the bulk of the work tasks being contracted outside a business, the actual supplies purchasing for a specific restroom can be located miles or even states away. and are now more disparate than when accomplished by in house personnel. These changes have ushered in a whole new set of challenges when it comes to maximizing the commercial restroom as an asset.
The traditional commercial restroom has provided water control and dispensing consumables through either manual operation, or automatic operation using infrared sensors or other sensors that detect the presence of users, of faucets on sinks, water closets, urinals and other consumables dispensers. At the present time many of these types of commercial restrooms have adopted “hands free” operation where the user touching the various plumbing fittings is minimized for the user's convenience or sanitary reasons. Most of these automatic sensors follow a logical routine for detecting valid targets (users within a predefined sensing zone) and ignoring invalid targets such as patrons walking past plumbing sensor detections zones or hands moving quickly below faucet and soap dispenser fittings. Typically, each valve operates alone with no communication or direct interaction with other valves and each sensor operates an associated fixture with no communication or correlation with other sensors. With no inter communication or central communication, potentially useful information that can be extracted from, for example, the activation and deactivation of individual sensors is not utilized and/or discarded. Simple counting of the activations may yield some basic inferential information on consumables but precise prediction of the entire property's restrooms can be greatly underutilized. Some prior art patents, owned by the assignee, U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,304,569 and 7,177,725 network these sensors for gross control of the restroom via a central controller offering two way communication between the plumbing fittings and a central area. The actual electronic detection elements of the sensor software are not broken up and only gross information of on and off and length between the on and off can be extrapolated. In the case of sensors to detect all levels of consumable paper and level of consumable liquids more sensors complicate the system network and are prone to diagnostic and added repair when they fail, increasing life cycle costs and system complexity.
The lack of restroom automation can also lead to wasted water due to valves that leak slowly or run-on causing flooding. Slow leaks during no-demand times can also prompt intervention by maintenance staff to fix a slow leak before it becomes so obvious it is running on. The lack of restroom automation further can lead to suboptimal operating conditions such as water flow-failure, exhausted consumable supplied, inoperable water fixtures, which can increase the cost of ownership, and/or general owner and user dissatisfaction due to any of the above. Accordingly, there is a substantial need for improved monitoring and maintenance of restrooms, and also there is, a need to maximize the restroom asset while minimizing the cost to maintain the asset by support services.
Additionally, there has been a movement to implement ecologically friendly and ecologically efficient systems and services in facilities, in particular, with respect to, e.g., water, paper, and soap consumption in restrooms. From a servicing standpoint, facilities managers as well as janitorial staff have also experienced frustration and an inability to effectuate efficient operating procedures allowing such staff to maintain consumables supplies and also to know when, for example, an appropriate time period (e.g., a lull in restroom activity) would allow janitorial staff to address issues in the restroom facilities. Hence, there is a need for implementing systems and methods that can address these problems from both the restroom user perspective and the servicing staff perspective. With more large facilities contracting out the housekeeping service, the need for making those servicing visits by outside personnel requires more exacting information on what to expect at a given commercial restroom within a property. It would be highly advantageous for such systems and methods to be integrated with solutions for addressing the need for improved monitoring and control of restrooms, as well as reducing the need for additional infrastructure, e.g., minimal use of sensors, thus simplifying and/or simply eliminating the increased cost and service requirements for additional sensors. With the increasing demand and economic pressure, monitoring the commercial restroom at a quality level with minimal costs, has become extremely difficult. There is a further need to maximize the restroom asset while minimizing the support services cost to maintain the asset.